Biography

Then came the hardcore years, brief and concentrated. Between 1987 and 1989 she made a handful of explicit features, most of them shot in Italy and one in the United States, and the sex was unsimulated: no soft-focus substitution, no body double, no cutaway at the moment of contact. She was not the first mainstream name to cross over, but she was one of the few who crossed all the way, and the films were sold on that fact. The marketing wrote itself. A familiar face from Italian comedy, now visible in a way the comedy had never allowed, and a body that had been a decorative element placed at the centre of the frame.

She stepped away from public life around 1990, at the point when the Italian business was moving from cinema to video and the kind of crossover she represented was closing. What remains is a split record: the comedies that made her famous and still screen, and a small, deliberate body of explicit work made at the end of the 1980s by a woman who was already a star. She died in 2014. This page sets out both halves, the mainstream years and the adult ones, and treats them as one career rather than as an embarrassment attached to the other.